Atlassian recently announced Forge, a new app development platform that introduces powerful capabilities for those looking to customize, extend or integrate with Atlassian cloud products. Forge is currently in private beta, and I encourage you to sign-up for the waitlist if you want to take it for a test drive!
The Forge private beta is targeted at customers building in-house custom integrations and apps for their teams. Through this period we'll be working with customers, and eventually existing marketplace vendor partners, to capture feedback and iterate on the platform before we make it generally available. Meanwhile, we're continuing to invest in Atlassian Connect – our existing cloud app development framework that powers over 1,000 cloud apps that are publicly available on the Atlassian Marketplace, as well as thousands of private apps built by customers to address their team's unique ways of working.
If you are looking to build a new app or integration for Atlassian cloud products (especially a commercial one), we recommend that you build with Connect. Connect is a stable, secure and feature-complete framework – and we're going to keep it that way. We are continuing to enhance Connect to address key gaps in functionality compared to server apps and add enterprise-ready features. There will always be a need for apps that access data and compute resources outside of the Atlassian cloud, and this core capability will always be part of our app development experience.
If you are looking to customize an Atlassian product to help your team or to tinker with what's possible (especially if you are interested in custom Jira automations or Confluence macros), we encourage you try out Forge. It's easy to get started and prove out your idea without having to worry about hosting, authentication and security requirements.
We're working to combine Connect and Forge into a single, unified development experience that enables self-hosted and Atlassian-hosted apps on a single platform. This means that any effort invested in Connect today will still pay off in the future. We're excited to share details later this year on how existing Connect apps can start taking advantage of Forge functionality. If you'd like to know more, please join me on the Atlassian Developer Community to discuss this announcement.